The topic also shows up towards the end of this documentary:

https://vimeo.com/521974505

The “Great Circle” comes up around an hour and 15 minutes in, but the whole thing is worth watching

https://indianajones.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Circle

Fucking Todd Howard is apparently the reason they went with this story.

The Great Circle was an ancient, theologically significant connection of seventeen locations around the world investigated by Indiana Jones in October/November 1937. The line cut through North Africa, the Middle East and southern Asia and South America, bisecting the Equator and forming a perfectly aligned circle.

The circle marked the positions of seventeen seemingly disparate spiritual and archaeological sites, each possessing a hidden, magical stone that could open portals once used by the man the Bible calls Noah to herd examples of God's earthly creations onto an ark to survive the Great Flood and repopulate the planet afterwards. Over thousands of years, however, many of the pieces were scattered by mankind.

In the aftermath of Emmerich Voss' failed plot to harness the relics' powers for the Third Reich, Jones found a crude mural beneath the Ziggurat of Ur which showed the points on the Great Circle converging on an eighteenth site: Antarctica.

…..

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer Todd Howard came up with the Great Circle mystery as the game's premise due to knowing about it as a real-world concept and, wondering what kind of game he would like to play if he were Indiana Jones, he thought that the Great Circle would make a good Indiana Jones video game due to the adventure it could lead to to the places they could take the players to.[2] As such, Howard helped the MachineGames/Bethesda Softworks creative team to develop the game's narrative first by bringing up the Great Circle so they could come up with the plot.[3]